Why Green and Vegan?

The journey toward a raw vegan eatery

Let me start off by saying that my husband cannot understand why I am doing this blog. He's right. We already have two blogs each. And struggle to keep up. He has a food blog and could do with help

Raw chocolate truffles

keeping on top of it. Why ANOTHER food blog?

The reason is because we want to open an underground restaurant at home. We want to serve good quality, healthy AND tasty food once a fortnight to people who love that sort of food as much as we do.

My husband's - Meat Free Everyday - blog is about what we eat, our journey to discovering new foods, eating out and better ways to prepare food. My blog is hopefully about our restaurant.

I can always change my mind and delete the blog if it proves too much of a challenge. I don't

Fruit salad and granola with raw coconut yogurt

envisage being able to post daily. More like fortnightly or even monthly? Ultimately I hope to post menus and dates for our dinners as well as pics of the food.

I don't think my husband and I are alone in our food journey. More and more people are questioning what they eat. I grew up in a staunch meat eating family and had never heard of vegetarianism until the age of 17. I went to visit a friend of a friend at a Hare Krisha temple. It made perfect sense to me not to eat living creatures and shortly after that in 1981 - I

Raw aged and fermented nut cheese

went vegetarian. Everyone thought it was a phase and would pass. That is a good few decades ago. Not a fad after all.

My husband has been eating less and less meat since he met me. And the less meat he eats, the less his body can cope with meat. Who knew it's not normal to have heartburn and indigestion?

A few years back I cut out sugar and refined carbs. I was battling with hypoglycemia - the pre-diabetes stage. Bingo, hypoglycemia

Raw pizza

problem solved. Then my husband and I visited a dairy farm in the Netherlands and came face to face with the impact of large scale animal farming. I'm not going to preach on this blog. But we were both deeply affected. We sat in our hotel room that night and trawled the Internet to see if what we had observed was standard practice. The animals we saw actually had it good. Dairy and chicken farming is cruel.

I didn't want to start eating carbs again. I also wanted to make sure our vegan diet was

Raw Cardmon and Ginger cookies

healthy. The average vegan meal is hummus or falafel with veg on a wrap, or a piece of bread. Maybe a veggie pasta or risotto? There are so many exciting vegan food options but no one is putting them out there. Hello? A gap for us maybe?

The most recent step for us was going raw. We did a raw food weekend course and it was logical that fresh, raw and organic food was much more nourishing than burnt, long-life, heavily processed and refined food. Why didn't we come to this conclusion sooner? What was a complete surprise to me was how tasty raw food is. And how easy it is to make. Yes, you need to

Raw Pad Thai with mushroom "scallops"

make a few swaps in the kitchen. And in your head.

Out with the microwave and in with a dehydrator. I do not know how we lived without a high speed blender. Love, love my spiraliser. I've discovered new ingredients like Irish Moss and Nutritional Yeast. I've learned to make fermented and aged nut cheeses and raw chocolate is a billion times better than anything I have had before.

I need to say that I am mostly vegan. At home it's easy. Going out it's harder. I'm 100% vegetarian. I never, ever eat meat, chicken or fish. But if I

Raw mango tart

eat out and there's a limited menu or a friend invites us for a meal - and it contains dairy or eggs - I will still eat the food. I'm not trying to change the world. But I do hope to convince people that it is possible - actually preferable - to eat really good vegan food.